In our previous tutorial, we showed you how to host a static website inside your Google Drive account. Although Google Drive is primarily a cloud storage and file sync app, I do not use it to sync files and folders across all my computers and mobile devices. I prefer Dropbox for file sync because I feel it is more feature rich, gives me more free space and allows me to sync entire folders across my mac, Android phone and Windows computer.

But sometimes, you may want to save web content in your cloud storage accounts, so you don’t have to search for the same file again and again on the web. For example, it is a great idea to create a “Wallpapers” folder within your Google Drive account and save Bing wallpapers and Flickr photos right into it. This is better than plain bookmarking because you’re saving the actual file in your Google Drive account, which will automatically download in your computer’s hard drive, thanks to Google Drive’s desktop application.

The good news is that Google Drive team has released a nifty Chrome extension which allows you to save files inside your Google Drive account, directly from the internet. You can use the extension to save entire webpages in your Google Drive account, or choose to save screenshots, images, files and other web media within your Google Drive account.

If you are browsing the web and want to save a webpage in your computer and keep a backup copy of the same page in the cloud, it is a good idea to use Google Drive and save the HTML file in your Google Drive account.

You can configure the extension settings to save full page screenshots of a webpage in Google Drive, so this is extremely useful when you want to save webpages locally for later reading. One use case I can imagine is this – use the extension and grab screenshots of webpages you find interesting and want to read later. These images will automatically be downloaded in your computer’s Google Drive folder, so when your computer is not connected to the internet, you can read those pages offline.

The extension has an options page where you can choose any one of the following settings

Save a full page screenshot of the entire webpage in your Google Drive account.

Save a screenshot of only the visible region in your Google Drive account.

Save the entire webpage as an HTML file. The file will not render as a webpage but you would be able to see the source code of the saved page in Google Docs viewer. Later, when you run Google Drive’s desktop application, the HTML file will be downloaded in your local Google drive folder. So it is possible to open the HTML page in your browser and read it offline.

Pack the entire page and save it in WEb archive format (.mht)

Convert a webpage to Google Docs format and save it in your Google Drive account. This is not very useful unless of course, the website in question has a printer friendly layout or a separate print friendly css file within it.

Overall, the Save to Google Drive Chrome extension is a nice enhancement which you can use to save webpages, documents, images, media and other web content into your Google Drive account. The developers claim that the extension can be used to save audio and video files in Google Drive but I could not get it to work with YouTube videos.

Do check out another similar extension – Gmail attachments to drive. This one lets you automatically save Gmail attachments to your Google Drive account in one click.